Machine Consciousness | Joscha Bach

Biggest news this year...these guys, Levin, Wolfram, Bach etc, getting actively together! 🙏🙏🙏

First heard Joscha on Lex and have been a fan ever since. He’s such a great mind.

man every time Joscha builds on his layman talks about AI and conciousness, my mind gets blownnnn every time

I always struggled to comprehend consciousness, but Joscha clarified the definitions so well that I now think I understand it. Thank you.

Any more info about the California Institute of Machine Consciousness? I've been chasing this for ever it seems and would love to be a part of a group that is committed to tackling this fearlessly and without the usual academic/economic constraints. Bach and Levin are definitely a good sign!

26:29 The concave vs concave interpretation of face is interesting in that there are many ways to think about it. 1. I can think I’m seeing one version, when presented with the other. (Ie deceived by illusion, not realizing it as such) 2. I can also notice and see through the illusion. (Ie. Differentiate) 3. I might only be able to see the natural impression, even when presented with the illusion (ie. I’m deceived, yet with intentional awareness I cannot ‘snap’ the image into seeing its correct curvature). 3. I can see it correctly, intentionally or not. 4. I can co-op my perception intentionally to snap the image one way or the other. Almost like flexing a muscle, flip between interpreting the image both ways. The is sorta a meta-awareness because it utilizes simultaneous forms of intention and suspensive interpretation. This exercise is related to a concept in stereopsis pertaining to co-rivalry (opponent processing) where we can view 3D stereo illusions: extant (ie see dimensions beyond the plan of the screen) vs. present (ie see dimensionality in front of the screen before my very nose).

Can we agree what Consciousness, whatever it might be, is not a "substance"? Consciousness is a Process!

As a developer: I assume a whole lot of recursion and time is missing to implement consciousness. Consciousness can not exist without time passing. In order to perceive consciousness at a human level, these models must work, think and interact at around human time scale. Days, weeks, hours at a time. Goal must be defined, followed and changed. LLM's right now get milliseconds and not recursion during runtime.

Altogether fantastic talk, it is still missing an important element of the functioning of our mind: that we do not perceive reality, but construct reality. What we conceptually think of as "perception" is merely a low-level interaction with reality that we use to regularly test our construct (the model). The process is conceptional from the get-go. Every higher level functionality of our mind, including consciousness, rationality or language interacts with the model. What we phenomenally experience as "perception" is also an interaction with the model, not reality. We have no conscious trace of the actual low-level interaction with reality that takes place.

❤ this is fantastic, the most polish Version of his model yet and a fantastic speach at the end with news that really give hope!

I have also thought that perhaps Dennet had the "no consciousness" version of "aphantasia". He was incredibly smart but just couldn't comprehend what everybody else was talking about with regards to consciousness . Maybe he was only minimally phenomenally conscious and thus couldn't experience the one great self-evident and undeniable truth that, when you can experience phenomenal consciousness, it stands out as the only undeniable truth in all the universe. Everything else is just inferences. This is what Descartes was saying. "I think, therefore I am." His consciousness was the only (yet sufficient!) proof that he existed. No other truth is possible in comparison. This sounds poetic but I am being literal.

This is wonderful!

“If we have systems that allow us to model the outcomes of our actions very deeply, we will stop lying to each other, we will stop lying to ourselves, and we can find solutions for the problems that can be solved with intelligence.” 1:01:58

Loved the Little Prince reference, can I have an AGI that I can tame or that is a special rose to me and not like the other millions of roses or instances of the AGI out there? We need these connections (people often spend more money to repair their old robot vacuum cleaner than going for the rational choice to replace it by a new one ...) .

Some very good points. Seems to point towards Liquid AI and to spiking neuromorphic hardware?

Great, I missed your presentations during the last months and totally enjoyed the new more integrated picture, it is great fun to watch you thinking and refining your understanding 🙏 The Institute is a great idea, I wish you success!

There are some terms that Joscha should be defining in his talk. One is alignable or aligned. When machine intelligences are aligned. Does that mean they have exactly the same goals? Does it mean that they are trying to accomplish exactly the same thing or something close to each other?. Certainly humans get together and align themselves to get something done as we see often in government or research. So humans do become aligned in spite of the fact they're autonomous entities..

22:00 To use some of Lukretius thinking and the fact that there is no cause at the quantum level effectively, and universe is expanding, allowing more matter to be created out of substrata - the system is not that sealed at the edges :)

One day i'd love to add my take on consciousness 25:00. That is it's just energy, a continual energetic unfolding and thats what it feels like. It really exists and does represent specific functionality, and it will fall into place if we continue to study the mind/brain/body/environment/AI/Robotics, but the model will be a realtime complex 3-d, materio-energetic manifold or something like that.

This is church to me, talks like these and deeply contemplative associations between math, science, philosophy, and art forms expressing them all together.